The Golden Fleece, Science Education, and U.S. Science Policy1

The Golden Fleece, Science Education, 1 and U.S. Science Policy Richard C. Atkinson President University of California was pleased to accept Roger Hahn’s kind invitation to participate in I this colloquium series. It gave me an opportunity to rethink some events I was associated with at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the 1970s. I would like to review briefly U.S. science policy since World War II from the perspective of the National Science Foundation, and in particular from the narrower perspective of science education and the social sciences at NSF. This is a personal account, not a schol- arly one, and I would be delighted if my remarks were to stimulate some aspiring young historians to undertake a more careful study of the events I am going to discuss. My story begins with World War II and the remarkable success of U.S. science in the war effort—a critical factor in our victory. President Roosevelt’s science adviser, Vannevar Bush, had been a long-term member of the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he was one of the key people responsible for building the quality of that institution. Bush had a close personal relationship with Roosevelt. Near the end of the war the president asked him to define a plan for American science in the postwar period. That request led to Bush’s landmark report, Science, The Endless Frontier, one of the great documents of American history. The Bush report defined science policy for the post-World War II era. What was the nature of that report? No summary could do justice to Bush’s masterful analysis, but essentially he made three principal arguments about the future of the U.S. scientific enterprise. First, he argued that most aspects of R& D were the responsibility of the private sector. But he also recognized that market mechanisms would discourage the private sector from investing adequate funds in basic research. This led Bush to 1 This paper was read at the Colloquium Series on the History of Science and Technology, University of California at Berkeley, 10 November 1997. PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICA N PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 143, N O. 3, SEPTEMBER 1999 407 408 RICHARD C. ATKINSON This led Bush to his second argument: ensuring support for basic research in the postwar period should be the responsibility of the federal government, because the enormous benefits to society at large justified the investment. He did not believe basic research should be conducted in government laboratories, however, but in the universities of the nation. As the institutions responsible for the nation’s basic research, universities had pride of place in Bush’s vision of the research enterprise. Third, he argued that decisions about which university research projects the government would fund should be made via a peer-review process. Bush envisioned a federal agency that would be responsible for funding these research activities. Legislation was introduced in 1945, but because of disagreements between the Truman administration and Congress, as well as within the Congress itself, the National Science Foundation was not created until May 1950. The events of this five- year period are nicely described in an excellent recent biography of Vannevar Bush by G. Pascal Zachary. One of the debates surrounding that legislation involved the scope of the Foundation’s proposed activities. Harry Truman was now president. His associates urged a broader range of responsibilities for the foundation than Bush’s supporters did, one that included science education and the social sciences. Bush, on the other hand, had only minimal interest in including science education and no interest at all in including the social sciences. James Conant, a close colleague of Bush renowned for his reorganization of Harvard’s general education curriculum, was a strong proponent of including science education on NSF’s agenda. In the end, Conant’s view prevailed. Science education became one of NSF’s responsibilities. So did the social sciences, but without a clear mandate to fund them. NSF got off to an extremely slow start, with minimal funding in the various sciences. There was a trickle of science education activities in the early years, but they were almost wholly confined to supporting fellowship programs for graduate students. Bush and many other leading scientists of that period felt NSF was not meeting their initial expectations, and viewed the agency as of little consequence. The world changed in October 1957, when Sputnik was launched. The public response bordered on panic: there was much alarmed discussion of an education gap—an ominous disparity between the quality of American science education and its counterpart in the Soviet Union. Within a month the administration established the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), which played a very important role in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. Congress responded with the National Defense Education Act, which dramatically T HE GOLDEN FLEECE 409 increased federal funding for student loan programs and graduate fellowships in science and engineering, among other things. In the post-Sputnik years, support for science climbed rapidly, and funding for NSF took off. Gradually the activities in the social sciences increased, until by 1968 legislation was introduced to change the NSF Organic Act to require funding in these disciplines. In particular, science education blossomed. NSF began offering summer institutes for K-12 teachers, in which leading university scientists met with teachers to discuss scientific developments and how to teach them. Even more important were curriculum develop- ment projects. Few people trusted the Office of Education to carry out this responsibility; NSF was the agency everyone turned to. NSF started in physics, with a curriculum developed by Zacharias of MIT, and a mathematics curriculum quickly followed. So did a program in chemistry; faculty at UC Berkeley played an important role in developing the chemistry curriculum. One can criticize these programs. They were too difficult for the average student—too focused on the best students—but the simple fact is that if you go anywhere in the world today, you will find that these programs are still in use and are regarded as outstanding curricula. The curriculum projects went so well that NSF decided to be even bolder. It ventured into the biological sciences and began to develop and distribute biology courses to the high schools. Teachers were given special training, and the curricula were widely used. Eventually these curricula expanded to include topics on evolution, which brought out the creationists in force. They criticized NSF’s involvement both as undermining religious beliefs and as a federal intrusion into local authority. But the loudest outcry was reserved for a social science curriculum called Man: A Course of Study (MACOS). MACOS was developed under the intellectual leadership of Jerome Bruner, who was at Harvard at that time. MACOS focused on cultural diversity, principally from an anthropological viewpoint, and was aimed at students in grades seven, eight, and nine. One of the films produced for the course told the story of an Eskimo village above the Arctic Circle. Among the Eskimo practices depicted in the film was the custom of borrowing someone else’s wife to keep you warm on a long journey across the ice if your own wife was not well enough to accompany you. Another was the practice of abandoning grandparents on an ice floe when they became too old to contribute. MACOS succeeded brilliantly in demonstrating cultural differences; it was equally effective in arousing public outrage. There were protest rallies, public meetings at schools that 410 RICHARD C. ATKINSON adopted MACOS, and vitriolic editorials—Jim Kilpatrick wrote extensively on the damage MACOS was inflicting by undermining the moral character of America’s young people. Around this time Senator Proxmire began presenting Golden Fleece awards for instances of government fraud, waste, or abuse. An early award went to the Air Force for spending $2,000 per toilet seat for bombers. But soon Proxmire’s interest shifted to NSF, and the agency became a perfect target. One of the early awards was a Golden Fleece for a research grant entitled “The Sexual Behavior of the Screw- worm Fly.” Proxmire got tremendous attention for that; I’ll return to it a little later. Correction, February 2020. As pointed out to me recently by Jeffrey Mervis of Science magazine, this statement is in error. NSF did not make a grant for research on the screwworm fly. The actual research was first funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1930s, well before the Golden Fleece awards. When I first arrived at NSF, there was a document listing examples of research projects that appeared frivolous at the time they were conducted, but later yielded important applications. The screwworm fly was one of those examples and was frequently cited in Congressional testimony in defense of basic research. It proved to be the perfect counterexample to the Golden Fleece. How I managed to misrepresent this work is an instance of what psychologists would call the malleability of human memory. When he delved into the social sciences, he found an NSF- supported grant dealing with an experimental analysis of love from a social/psychological perspective, and another grant concerned with a theory of love. At that time the National Enquirer was paying a $500 bounty to freelance reporters who came up with a story of this sort, and many writers would just scan the titles of research projects supported by NSF. The Chicago Tribune had a field day with the theory of love grant, and as if this weren’t bad enough, they found a project titled “A Theory of Necking Behavior.” We tried in vain to find this grant on NSF’s list of social science projects.

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